Fabio Cifariello Ciardi

Fabio Cifariello Ciardi (1960) is a composer using sound and technology to mine real-word phenomena. His most recent interests are in sonification and instrumental transcription of speaking-voice rhythms and inflections.

He studied composition, electronic music and musicology at Rome Conservatory of Music and Bologna University. He studied with Tristan Murail, Philippe Manoury (IRCAM), Franco Donatoni (Accademia S.Cecilia). In 1991 he won the selection for the “Cursus de Informatique Musicale at IRCAM”. In 1995 he has been invited at EMS (Stockholm) and ì IMEB (Bourges) as composer in residence.

He has developed software algorithms for dissonance calculation, sound spatialization, financial data sonification, speaking-voice musical transcription and other computer-aided composition tools. Cifariello Ciardi collaborated with the Department of Psychology of “La Sapienza” University in Rome, the Research Institute for Music Theatre (Rome) publishing several works dedicated to music analysis, psychology and policy of music. Cifariello Ciardi collaborates with the Italian radio RAI-Radio3.

Cifariello Ciardi teaches composition at Trento Conservatory and one of the founding members of Edison Studio (http://www.edisonstudio.it).

Thanks for the support to Statens Musikverk, Swedish Arts Council and l’Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Stoccolma

“Voci vicine” is not a self-righteous opera, nor purely informative, nor political. It’s a contemporary work that engage at first and leave us with food for though then as we leave the hall. (Mauro Mariani, Giornale della Musica)

The stage is set with an ensemble and a throng of voices and faces: Italians that bring shames about their ever-recurrent tragedies, screaming words of hatred filled with emotions. It’s the voice of indignation the media bring everyday to Italian homes: a force as well as a weakness arising from pleas, illiterate tirades of extrovert tongues. How close are we to such voices?
It’s a hard-to-describe phenomenon wavering between genuine witnesses and misleading stances. How to investigate these voices, attenuating the muddling buzz that surround them? How to fetch a meaning while avoiding easy judgments? By a proper translation.
Fabio Cifariello Ciardi has collected and classified hundreds of video interviews according to the age, gender and regionality of the participants and the reasons for their hardship. That is, he tried to bring order from disorder at first. Secondly, he channeled such a flood of words by transcribing the intonation, the rhythm and the dynamic of each spoken-voice. Thirdly, he orchestrated the data for an ensemble of seven musicians playing acoustic as well as odd sounding objects. Finally, he integrated the original voices into a multilayered sonic texture articulated through arias, recitatives, strettas an other forms inspired by the Italian Opera.
The result is a constant struggle between spoken-voices and speaking-instruments that capture and amplify the emotional intensity of the speaker while withdrawing speaker’s words. Cifariello Ciardi aim to shed a ‘musical light’ on supra-segmental phonological information supremacy over semantics bonding together voices, instrumental and concrete sounds in an audiovisual contemporary “Passion” about the most up-to-date social and cultural typicalities of Italian people.Roberto Fabbi